Last Thursday, I took a stab at predicting how batter’s swing influences their ground ball / fly ball splits. One of the most important retorts to the research (a retort made both in the comments and on The Book blog) was that pitch location was the determining factor of bat angles — what I was attributing to hitter tendencies (at least for hitters who have big GB/FB platoon splits).
Consider today’s offering a second puzzle piece — hopefully an edge piece — in what is a 1000-piece puzzle of understanding GB/FB splits. Today I offer the case study of two (essentially randomly picked) hitters with large GB/FB platoon — Adam Dunn and Jay Bruce.
The results surprised me, twice, and in the end, it appears these two hitters employ different swing patterns, suggesting there may be traction with my original theory, even though pitch location does have a considerable affect on swing angles.
Why Bruce and Dunn? Well, if we refer to the dataset Jeff Zimmerman helped me put together in the first article

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